spinoff

(For J.A.)

 

Once upon a time, this writer and a friend ran a small magazine publishing company. It’s defunct now, unable to match the excellence of its products with excellence in sales, and exists only in the archives of libraries.

 

This friend – lets call him A – and I were working late one night, concentrating as we always did on getting the magazine right (note to budding entrepreneurs: spend less time on getting the product right, and more time on getting the profits up. Learn from our mistakes, please…).

 

There was a knock on the door, and A pottered down to see who it was – this was central London, and it was late, and we had a large picture window that it would have been expensive to replace, so we always answered the door in case someone was standing there with a brick.

 

After a few minutes A called me down, saying ‘You have got to listen to this’. At the door was a short man, suffering from the sort of birth defect that leaves one with very, very short arms.

 

In a cut glass accent, he went into his spiel: he was going door to door selling, essentially, junk: bean filled juggling balls, cigarette lighters, small toys and the like. And he was mesmerising. He had the best sales patter of almost anyone I have heard: funny, engaging, interesting, all the while delivered with a magic and directness that made the slightest piece of junk he pulled out of his bag immediately attractive.

 

We were spellbound. In fact, we were so spellbound that we offered him a job on the spot. He didn’t take it. He didn’t want it. He liked the independence of walking the streets. He liked choosing when to work, of choosing what to sell, of being his own man.

 

“I don’t like offices, gentlemen,” he said, “I don’t like timesheets, and I don’t like wage packets. I like my own time, and my own money.” We tried harder. This man was not a good salesman. He was an excellent salesman: and that’s what we really, really needed.

 

But what we needed did not match what he wanted, and so – hypnotised by him and his pitch – we bought pretty much whatever he had, and shaking our heads went back to our editorial.

 

Lessons? If you know what you want, you can do what you want, no matter the length of your arms or how weird what makes you happy seems to other people. And you can be good at it, and you can make people envy you.

 

Why’s he in this blog? Because Spinoff is about ‘power in all its forms’ and this man had more power that night than A or I and, I suspect, continues to have that power, walking the streets carrying a heavy bag of junk and knocking on doors.

 

I’d like him to know that I have his cigarette lighter in the shape of a motorbike on my desk as I’m writing this. I’d like him to know that if I saw him today, I’d still offer him a job. And most importantly, I’d like him to know he made such an impression that nine years on, I’m writing about him.

 

Not, I suspect, that that would matter to him in the least. Doing what you want, and leaving a mark in people’s hearts. What’s that if it’s not power?

 

Yours etc.,

 

Spinoff.

2005 was crap for people dying. This Spinoffite lost six friends between the last two months of 2004 and the end of 2005. Tsunamis, car crashes, cancer, old age and the actions of our American ‘allies’ all contrived to kill family and friends, seemingly at random. The only connection between them was that I could have done with them still being around.

 

We’ve already written in this blog about our friend Paul, who despite being dead many months is still at the core of any meeting of the Spinoff crew. (Is it crew? Or Crewe? For that matter is there a Crewe crew? We – the free press – demand answers, etc…)

 

You know what it’s like when someone dies. You spend ages seeing them by accident in crowds: seeing them going into doorways, in crowds on the subway, just out of view on the television news. But slowly they seem to fade from the visual memory, and it becomes hard even to bring their faces back to mind. But for this writer at least, their voices echo into the present.

 

My great-aunt, a joyful and happy character even into her final blind and deaf days, could still laugh at the world – and it’s her voice I hear when I really need cheering up. A truly clever and great man, my mentor, who characteristically died saving his family in the Asian tsunami, had a way of muttering when writing newspaper articles that I’ve started to do myself.

 

An Iraqi friend, whose delight in the achievements of his young son always found itself in his muttered ‘mashallah’s, slips his voice into my head whenever I see small children playing (and yes, Mr Bush, I put his death straight onto your head and dearly hope you will be judged harshly for it).

 

And some days, when the missing of them feels like a physical pain, wrenching at the inside of my chest, and I want to cry for the very need to see them again, if I’m lucky I can hear their voices, still clear and alive, still full of the richness and humour that made me glad to be their friends in the first place, echoing in that little space in my head where they still live.

 

As a bit of a god-botherer, I hope I shall see them again. But until then, I hear dead people. And I’m very grateful I can, because it makes their loss more bearable. A little.

 

Yours etc.,

 

Spinoff.

 

P.S. Today’s Irony Watch -- Mr D. Rumsfeld

"They (the Iranians) are currently putting people into Iraq to do things that are harmful to the future of Iraq and we know it. And it is something that they, I think, will look back on as having been an error in judgment."

So God told Tony Blair to go to war in Iraq, did He? We’ve dealt with this when George Bush said the same thing (http://spinoff.blogspirit.com/archive/2005/10/10/head-vo... and there’s really no need to go into the arguments again.

 

It should be said, however, that positing this particular outbreak of nastiness as something provoked by the Christian God rather gives weight to those who call the Iraq war a ‘crusade’. We don’t want to take this up with politicians - we’d rather take it up with God.

 

The rather wonderful ‘Angels and Demons in Art’, (by Rosa Giorgi, published in the J Paul Getty Museum’s series on Imagery In Art, go buy it now), shows innumerable artworks in the western tradition where God directly intervenes in human affairs*. These interventions betray a character best described as bi-polar.

 

The God of the Old Testament is, in his own words, trouble: “I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me” (Exodus 20:5). He gets a change of heart in the New Testament, it’s true, equally inconveniently for our fundamentalist friends, for whom smiting is much more fun than turning the other cheek, but there’s no doubt that this is a deity who could get a little chippy at times.

 

But we thought he’d stopped telling people to go to war. We thought he’d started working in order to, well, if not exactly stop them, to at least mitigate their effects. One of the Ten Commandments is, after all, ‘love they neighbour as thyself’. And the blessed mother of Christ certainly isn’t in favour of smiting.

 

So what’s going on here? God’s told two major world leaders to mobilise their entire country to go and dump on some other country? Why? What’s he thinking of? Did he say ‘Yes, go to war’, or ‘Oh… alright. If you must’?

 

No he bloody didn’t. It would be inconsistent with Christ’s revelation for him to do so, and even a triune god, who must every so often have a bit of a spat with his various component parts, isn’t going to go back on something as major as the death of his son just because it’s politically convenient for some of his followers to capture a bit of oil-soaked land.

 

The question is not that God told them to do it. That’s obviously nonsense. It’s that they’re using his name to drag us into, and keep us in, a war.

 

And without being too apocalyptic about it, if someone told them to do it, and it wasn’t God, who was it? And what will he tell them to do next?

 

Yours etc.,

 

Spinoff.

 

* Angels come from images of Assyrian genies, apparently. Which must be a bit of a bugger for fundamentalist Christians, since the Assyrians would most certainly not have approved of a Christian god, and the Jewish god used them to teach his people a lesson more than once…